Happy Friday, everyone!
Nationally, the auto market is on the upswing.
How are your local car and truck dealerships doing?
Looking forward to reading your replies!
Incidentally, if you haven't yet read it, you might like to check out Paul Weyland's insightful article, How to Help Automotive Dealerships in 2011.
In a word.....good!! We have Ford/Lincoln, Chevy/GMC here and from all reports they are benefitting from the upswing. Talk around is that Ford is doing well because they did not take a bailout. That is translating to the local dealership. The local Ford store is spending record amounts on radio(big grin here).
I know this is happening a little bit locally, but the news nationally is much better, than the news locally.
It seems that our local dealers are doing better. I have even noticed the former GM Dealers that stayed in business selling late model cars and trucks are also doing much better.
Business is up. Several dealers that dropped off are now back but their focus has changed a little. They are very much concentrating on their base and not trying to reach out as far as before.
This month we conducted a survey of 400 people. We did it in person at an event in town. We asked people questions about businesses and three of the questions were "name a place to buy tires, name a place to get your car repaired and name a place to buy a used car". The dealerships did not do well. I met with the owner of a number of dealerships here and asked him about tires. He indicated that his tire prices are better than most tire places. He was also surprised by the auto service numbers. In the end, he ended up buying about $1K per month to talk just about service and tires. I will be repeating this presentation with other auto dealers.
By the way, average spending on Auto Repairs per household:
2007 $725
2008 $2867
2009: 3400
2010 4506
When I asked the dealer what he made of these numbers he said "up until a few years ago, when people started having issues with a car they would trade it in. Now they want to fix it"
Awesome idea, Chris! What other business categories did you include in the survey questions?
